


Perched In The Soul

by CallMeBombshell



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-02
Updated: 2011-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-24 06:11:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeBombshell/pseuds/CallMeBombshell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a small hope, the sort of thing Dean’s always tried to ignore. It’s the small, insidious sort of hope that sinks in deep and takes hold before he even knows it’s there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perched In The Soul

_Hope is the thing with feathers  
That perches in the soul.  
And sings the tune  
Without the words,  
and never stops at all._  
\--Emily Dickinson

 

Two days after the freak eclipse and the door to Purgatory, two days after Jimmy Novak’s body disappeared under the water and Dean plucked a sodden trench coat from the bank, he stands bare-chested in the bathroom in Bobby’s house and stares at his reflection. The handprint, burned angry red into his shoulder and then faded into pale pink scar tissue, is still there.

Somehow, Dean is suprised. Somehow he’d thought that the mark might vanish with it’s maker, that when Castiel’s borrowed body sank beneath the water, the mark might fade, washed away just like the former angel.

Rationally, Dean knows that it’s just a scar, just something left behind like so many others, just physical proof of all the crap he’s been through in his life. But there’s some small part of him, some tiny, naive part, perhaps, that whispers that maybe there’s a chance. That maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance that Cas is still out there somewhere, that when his vessel failed, when the Leviathans tore him apart from the inside, some small part of his Grace escaped back to Heaven.

It’s a small hope, the sort of thing Dean’s always tried to ignore. It’s the small, insidious sort of hope that sinks in deep and takes hold before he even knows it’s there. In Dean’s experience, it’s these sorts of hopes that hurt the most when they get ripped to shreds, digging in like tiny shards of glass underneath his nails until he’s torn himself into ragged, tired pieces just trying to forget them.

And yet.

And yet he can’t help the tiny bubble of hope that rises in him, hysterical, that tiny whisper in the back of his head saying, _What if he’s out there? What if he survived?_

The trench coat hangs in the back of Bobby’s hall closet behind mostly-forgotten-about coats and jackets that no one’s worn in years. It’s clean now, washed free of the blood and black ooze it had been covered in. It’s washed free of the dust and the sweat that had soaked into it, too, and Dean thinks that’s almost a shame, like he’s washed away that last little bits of proof that Cas ever really existed, that his borrowed body was as much a part of him as his Grace. But it’s worth it to be rid of the sharp, pricking smell of Purgatory, so different from Hall and yet so similar, and Dean tells himself that the dust and the sweat were only Jimmy Novak anyway, just traces of Earth left behind in the wake of beings more powerful than anything in his world.

That doesn’t stop Dean from shoving aside the others coats in the closet until he can reach in and run a finger along the collar, tracing the edge of a lapel. He’s still not sure why he pulled the trench coat from the water, why he took it with him and fixed it up, why he kept it. He feels foolish, a little, like he’s back in high school and pining away after a shirt some girl left behind in whatever crap hotel room they’d been staying in. He keeps telling himself that Cas is gone, that he’s not coming back for it, that it’d never really been Cas’s anyway, just something of Jimmy’s that he’d kept because he saw no reason not to.

Dean runs his hand over the fabric once more before he catches himself and steps back, swallowing hard. He closes the closet door, but stays where he is, hand still on the knob, staring at the wood like somehow, if he stares hard enough, things will start to make sense again and he’ll get the answers he wants. He shakes himself, swallows again, and forces himself to step back again, and then again, until he’s standing in the middle of the hall, far enough away that he can finally make himself turn and walk away towards the kitchen.

He needs a drink.

Bobby sits at the kitchen table, staring down at a stack of local papers with a mug in his hand that looks a little too amber to be coffee. Dean cracks the cap on a beer and settles in opposite him, rubbing at his eyes with one hand. Bobby looks up but doesn’t say anything, and Dean’s grateful, so incredibly fucking grateful, because he isn’t sure he could even muster the strength to say that he doesn’t want to talk about it. He can feel the mark on his shoulder, the slight difference in sensitivity when the fabric of his shirt moves across it as he reaches for the laptop sitting on the table.

Dean pulls the sleeve of his shirt down further and gets back to work.


End file.
